The present invention relates to circuitry in a communications receiver for compensating for the presence of a time varying multipath component in the received signal, and in particular to a system for detecting the characteristics of the time varying multipath component.
In terrestrial broadcast communications systems, signals from a transmitting antenna often arrive at a receiving antenna not only via a direct path from the transmitting antenna to the receiving antenna, but also via one or more other paths due to reflections off of objects in the broadcast area. Signals resulting from such reflections are termed multipath signals. Such objects may be fixed in location, such as buildings, producing a fixed multipath signal. Such objects may also be moving, such as airplanes. Moving objects present more problems because the magnitude and phase of the multipath signal components from such objects vary over time, sometimes relatively rapidly.
When one or more multipath components are present in a received signal, the carrier received by the receiver and tracked by the demodulator is a composite signal formed from the main signal component which traveled the direct path, combined with the reflected multipath signal components. However, the multipath components usually have different phases and magnitudes than the main path component, and, for moving objects, the phase and magnitude difference is time-varying, due to, for example, the Doppler-shift effect. These phase and magnitude differences can adversely affect the signal processing performed in the receiver. Some receiver systems include circuitry for compensating for received signals including a multipath component.
More specifically, each receiver includes a chain of processing circuitry for demodulating the signal modulated on the carrier. Each of the processing circuits in the demodulator chain may include adaptive circuitry which may be controlled to compensate for the presence of multipath components in the received signal. For example, in a high definition television (HDTV) receiver, the demodulator chain may include the known arrangement of a carrier tracking loop (CTL), symbol timing recovery loop (STL), equalizer, and so forth, each including adaptive circuitry (carrier tracking bandwidth, symbol timing recovery bandwidth, equalizer bandwidth, etc.) controlled to compensate for the presence of multipath components. For the adaptive circuitry to operate properly, it must receive a control signal which identifies the characteristics of the received multipath components accurately and in a timely manner.
Prior art multipath compensating systems derived the control signal by monitoring the bit error rate of the output signal of the demodulator chain as the adaptive circuitry was adjusted to different settings. The setting that resulted in the minimum bit error rate was then used to set the value of the control signal for the demodulator chain. However, this process is slow and not easily adaptable to fast varying multipath components. In addition, as the settings for the adaptive circuitry in the demodulator chain are varied to find the optimum setting, it is possible for the output of the demodulator chain to experience a relatively high bit error rate, which degrades the subsequent signal processing and becomes perceived by the user. For example, in an HDTV receiver, this process may introduce artifacts into the image represented by the video component, and/or noise into the sound represented by the audio component, of the received signal which will be perceived by the user.
A system of deriving a control signal for the adaptive circuitry in the demodulator chain which operates quickly and does not result in perceived degradation of the received signal is desirable.